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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
I've been having a good time with anime lately...I'm feeling better about it than I have in a while. I've been taking time to watch things I've either respected from afar or only watched part of and never finished, which is really paying off. As a result, I've mostly been watching classics. I've watched a decent amount since whenever the last time I participated in this was, but I'll keep it to recent highlights.
3-gatsu no Lion is an absolute modern classic and has gotten the proper recognition since it aired. I wrote a short review of it here.
I finished watching the first season of Initial D. While it's not my absolute favorite, I enjoy it a good deal and will be watching the rest of the series. It's also sorta inspiring, I'd like to do similar 3d animation someday when I'm good enough. Even in parodies I've found that style so charming, and it seems somewhat achievable as a long-term goal for an amateur.
I'm not yet finished with Mushishi, but I'm adoring it despite my first time trying it out not going that well. It's the rare show which is so thoughtful and quiet that after finishing an episode, you often feel like sitting there in silence chewing it over for a while. There's a reason this has been maybe the third most cliche anime elitist's favorite show for a long time now.
Romeo no Aoi Sora is a weird one. I don't have much to say, except that I was very engage until I figured out what the moral statement it was trying to get across was. When that became obvious, I just found it to be gross and frustrating, so I dropped it.
Seasonals:
Dr. Stone is impressing me. I'm a manga reader and if I'm honest, this story works far better in anime form. A lot of the worth of a story like this is front-loaded when the possibilities of the premise seem endless, and the simple fact that anime takes way longer to watch than manga takes to read benefits it. Plus it's just a good adaptation. It inherits the manga's problem with the villain being basically just correct, but I can overlook it for just how fun the series is.
Vinland Saga immediately makes it clear why the manga is so well-regarded. It feels so special, I can't help but be excited to be watching something air which I know will continue to be talked about for years and years.
Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo. is something I was super worried about going in. Excuse me, but in my time watching anime I have learned to be wary of stories about the sexuality of adolescent girls. I'm not caught up on this one, but what I've seen so far is encouraging...it's not creepy like I thought it could've been.
Kanata no Astra is fine. I'm somewhat invested in the mystery of the thing so I'll probably stick around, but it's not terribly interesting.
I need to pick up more seasonals, I just need to sift through the opinions of people I trust.
Oh, and for manga I'm reading Osamu Tezuka's Buddha. Its scope is incredible and I'm loving it...I'll chime back in when I finish it!
Aside from the currently airing series, I picked up Kengan Ashura from Netflix and have made it a little less than half way through the season. It's kind of like an overpowered MMA style anime. The plot is kind of thin and focuses more on action, but it's been pretty enjoyable so far.
For the currently airing stuff I've enjoyed Vinland Saga, Kanata no Astra, and DanMachi S02 so far. From what I remember of the manga VInland Saga has been following it pretty closely so far, so it hopefully stays as good through the whole season. Kanata no Astra (Astra lost in space) so far has set up a good story that I would like to see the conclusion to, the characters are a bit weak, so the ending will probably make or break whether it is good overall.
I was a fan of DanMachi S01 and I even enjoyed the Sword princess arc. It's got a good mix of D&D and comedy without being too serious. This 2nd season kind of had a weird pacing so far, but will have to see where it's all leading to before I decide if I like it or not.
You think so? Shishio is a psychopath, a visionary villain who assassinates a whole bunch of people in the name of a highly conjectural ideal. The only mitigating factor (but not really) is that his victims don't look very alive.
He puts a ridiculous amount of faith on the notion that the youth will build a world that is necessarily superior. That's a naive cliche, nothing more. Just look at these guys!
Well that's the thing, they make him a killer because otherwise "let's make a better world without recreating the same prejudices and inequalities" would be infinitely more convincing than Senku's mindless "let's make everything exactly the same!" His ideology doesn't require him to be a mass murderer, that's clearly just a correction to put you against him.
His focus on youth is a little strange (you could probably drag in a whole narrative of Japan's history of resenting older generations if you wanted to), but he at least recognizes the need to make something better and take the opportunity of a stone world to make something good. The "revive the young" bit is a weird means to that end, but it's clearly at least better than Senku's plan.
Senku is not an angel by any means, but your argument defends a sanitized version of Shishio. As depicted in the show, he is a murderous villain. Shishio could be much different, but that is not the case so far.
...sure, if we lived in that world, it would make sense to think so. But given that we don't treat Dr. Stone as a historical document, we can look at the character as a fictional character, which calls into question why he's a murderer. Why is he written that way? Does the ideology he represents require that? No, of course not. It's silly and over-the-top.
But if you imagine a character with similar views who debates Senku for being incredibly naive and not taking into account the massive amounts of unnecessary suffering in the world he's trying to rebuild...at best it's a complicated political situation which really distracts from what the series wants to get at: SCIENCE GOOD! At worst, though, Senku looks like a fucking asshole. So to get back to the SCIENCE, make him a murderer.
I essentially feel how Caitlin at AniFem does, and have since I first read the manga:
Suppose he did not shatter any living statue, but simply chose to not revert the "stonization" process of adults. Would he be a mass murderer? No, because the statues are technically alive. Would he be a villain? Yes, because he would be denying the rights of those people to have a regular, not-"stonicized" life, based only on a crazy fundamentalist belief. In short: a visionary villain.
It is quite possible to make reliable interpretations of fictional works. Some things are open and others are not. For instance: it is incontrovertible that Superman can fly. In some ways, fiction is more black-and-white than reality itself. Umberto Eco wrote about that.
I think you could make your first case, but not everyone would agree and there would be a lot more room for Senku as a hero to not work. If I were in that world, while Shishio would not be entirely lined up with my beliefs (if he wasn't going on mass murdering sprees), I would gladly join him over Senku. The story doesn't really have room for that attitude, since that tension isn't really the point of the story, so making him a mass murderer is an easy way to make him a more clear-cut villain. I find that deeply unsatisfying and lazy. It doesn't ruin the series for me, but it is a big flaw in my eyes.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. What I'm saying is that "but he killed all those people!" reads to me like a pointless in-universe justification for a point which treats the work as reality rather than as a piece of art. You don't have to get into authorial intent or anything shaky like that to read a piece of art as a piece of art. Reading it as a piece of art is the approach to the vast majority of criticism. Reading it as a universe which exists as if it were real is the same kind of painful argument that leads to the "but she's 6,000 years old!" point "loli" defenders make (in the reasoning, not in how disgusting the argument being made is...I'm not making you out to be like that! In fact I appreciate that you're willing to have this conversation at all.).
As I alluded to earlier, I'll also link Folding Ideas' video on The Thermian Argument for reference. Note that the example of the argument in this video is a lot more sinister than what I think is going on here...so don't think I'm accusing you of anything bad beyond just disagreeing.
I don't know if that's true. Possible world semantics is vastly popular (and effective) in literary criticism. It is also way more subtle and sophisticated than the examples you presented.
I don't really have data to back this up, but just personally, the vast majority of what I see is working based on assumptions that are incompatible with that approach. Any criticism which treats a work as a cultural product of some kind that is a product of humans and which impacts humans (feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, queer, etc.) is concerned with how it operates in the real world, or how it plays off the real world. Even formalist approaches which intentionally ignore those things are at least looking at a text as functional artistic parts, not as concerned with the internal consistency of the universe.
But since popularity is hard to argue, I'd go with something else that's hard to argue just to say that it's boring and by definition tells us nothing which matters to anyone unless we find ourselves as characters in the fictional universe. If we're not looking at art for something that's real, even if that reality is super abstract and pointless to some, I just see a waste of time.
When well applied, possible world semantics acknowledges that narrative works are semiotic objects in deep relation with the real world. There is a clear distinction between the two, but no analyst or theoretician I've read in that field ignores this interdependence in favor of some idealistic/uninformed/incomplete dive into fictional worlds.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm intimately informed on this approach, but that seems to be beside the point, since we got here because I said you weren't taking into account its function as a cultural product. My problem came from its weak social commentary and how a character's ideology is puffed up to be absolutely silly and much easier to throw aside without serious consideration, and nothing about how he's actually a really bad guy in the world of Dr Stone has any bearing on that.
"It didn't feel that way to me," as you said in another comment, is fine with me though. A focus on the reader in general might be a place to go from there, but that's not something I would care to argue.
However, I would be interested if you could provide a reading recommendation wrt possible world theory specifically related to literary criticism. From some quick searching and quickly looking through your link, everything is either about the concept much more generally and outside of what I'm interested in or is just unsatisfying and vague.
Cool. I studied possible world semantics when I was pursuing a master's degree in literature, which is now either abandoned or paused (don't ask). The main text is Naming and Necessity, by Saul Kripke. Quite a dense read by one of the most respected contemporary philosophers. I still don't know how much of it I understood, if anything at all. But I feel like I got something in return.
IEP's article on Modal Metaphysics is probably a good bet. You cannot escape the fact that possible world semantics is basically applied modal logic. SEP's article is good, but probably too dense on notation. I do not remember studying anything on how to actually apply it to literature, though. I like to go to the sources... Arrogance. Maybe one of the reasons my masters is paused :P
Good luck!
I just remembered about a great book that does apply modality (and other cool things) to fiction and representation: Mimesis as Make-Believe, by Kendall L. Walton.
I personally avoid engaging in this kind of discussion because they most frequently lead to weak/convoluted arguments that have little to do with the work in question. Hypothesizing about the author's motives is another dead-end. I don't have much patience for this kind of conjecture. But yes, you can certainly do that.
I don't quite mean what you say here. I'm not talking about what the author actually intended (a direction I loathe going in), but the effect it has. It feels like that's what happened. That's a focus on reader response, not falling into the intentional fallacy.
Well, the character might have been handled badly in that regard, but I did not get the feeling that his statue smashing was over-the-top or unrequired. He's not a philosopher, but an MMA fighter with a twisted view of the world. He acts like it.
That's cool, not saying you have to feel the same way. It just takes me out of it and feels off. There's a part of me that wanted the series to go in a more political direction but it strips that away pretty quickly and being salty over that is probably a factor in my thoughts as well.
I liked it too, but what bothers me the most about this show is how a bunch of people that spent literally thousands of years standing still inside a rock cask did not become 100% batshit crazy as a result...
Only really watching GRANBELM, Demon Girl, Maidens and Astra. Demon Girl is dumb fun, Maidens is pretty solid, Astra is most certainly a ride, and GRANBELM is gearing up for something that will either work really well, or not. But that's how anime works.
Note: Free month of Crunchy expired, considering getting VRV to consolidate my stuff.
I resumed watching Code Geass. Intelligent protagonists always attract me. I don't think I'll ever find an anime of that sort that I like more than Death Note, but Geass gets close. The whole political atmosphere is very interesting. Also mechas.